Sonatas
by Dim Aldebaran
Summary: Two AH semisongfics, nom'd for the Orion Awards. 'Ireland': Holly ponders her deteriorated friendship with Artemis, and wonders where she went wrong. 'Electric Blue': Artemis has united humans and fairies, yet Holly finds herself bitter.
1. Ireland

I R E L A N D

- Dim Aldebaran -

**:i:**

Here is a story  
of hope and of glory.  
He's eighteen years old  
and well I fell in love.

Funny, the way things _really _work. It's not quite the way they have it in stories, but not quite the way mummy and daddy explain it either. I'll give it my best shot.

Love at first sight really does happen. It happens all the time; in the backseat of cars, in the darkness of movie theaters, in empty stairwells, in stalled elevators. Lily can give you some examples, if you dare ask.

It just didn't happen to me.

I almost wish it did; I'd have an excuse to hate him then.

It was one of those strange, creeping things. I suppose you could say he grew on me; but he isn't always such a parasite. Mulch and I used Arty—may I call him that?—as a resource. After a while, so did the LEP, using us as the negotiators. It was actually a fine arrangement. Gold is valued much higher in the Lower Elements than it is Up There, so it was actually cheaper for the LEP to use Arty, who was better for the more tedious arrangements anyway.

I saw him almost every day; if not in person, then via videophone. 'Chatting' was the natural consequence. Despite his shameful ego, he was actually quite charming once we warmed up to each other. We would often start breakfast together at Fowl Manor, discussing the latest Recon over marmalade toast and Darjeeling. The Council preferred us working together in person; fewer vids of their use of Mud Men.

But after that,  
where have you gone, from me?  
The one that I loved endlessly.

Things weren't so peachy after a while. Arty had largely gone legit, but Arty had a past. Arty had enemies.

Dom couldn't stop the kidnapping—he was shot with a tranquilizer while preparing our morning toast. 'Jade Princess' was on tour, oblivious. Angeline was sleeping, hidden under her thick duvet. Her husband barricaded himself inside his study, too cowardly to hold up to his own ideals.

They shot me twice and left me for dead, not counting on my Kevlar turtleneck, Arty's gift to me on his eighteenth birthday. I didn't even get to see Artemis go.

My magic woke me up at dusk, healed. I wasn't in the habit of using iris cams, so no one Below knew. Angeline had convinced her husband not to call the police, fearful of the questions they'd ask.

Elves are emotional creatures. I strapped on a pair of wings and flew; they were a civilian pair, perhaps not the sweet prototypes Foaly had lent me before, but still excellent.

Foaly had taken Arty's mindwipe as an opportunity to have a sort of locating device implanted in him. I tracked it to a wharf in Dublin Harbor, on board a small fishing ship bound to Russia. Someone, evidently, wasn't too pleased with the last attempt to ransom a Fowl.

I stole a gun from one of the guards. I had never used one before; it felt sloppy and uncivilized compared to the liquid fire of the Neutrinos, but I was hardly in a state to care.

Have you ever been in an emotional daze? Perhaps when you heard news of your grandmother dying, or a car accident, or getting dumped. Remember that strange numbness, that fever that followed—remembered how you couldn't think, couldn't feel, could only… react?

Now, imagine that extended for a half hour.

All I remember is the final shot.

In retrospect, Dublin's reaction to the crime is a riot. They couldn't figure out who stormed in and killed thirty men, all Interpol nightmares. No one traced the spiel to Arty and his daddy-dear; no one traced those deaths to me.

I saved Arty that day.

But I lost him too.

He had seen me kill.

We used to have a life,  
but now it's all gone.

Things weren't so innocent after that. When I tried to throw the gun away, Arty took it. He keeps it under his pillow now. I told him to throw it away, I told him it was filthy, I told him I wanted to forget—

He told me that no one should want to forget something. He told me—he told _me!_—that memories were precious, that memories should be preserved.

His father learned. Angeline learned. They wanted him to stop the Recons. They told him that it was unneeded. _Save the world another way_, his father had said. _You are a wonderful son, but you cannot do this._

Arty had grown a little idealistic under my influence. He didn't want to continue undercover; he hated outright deception. He didn't want to lie.

He wanted to mind wipe them.

I can't love a hypocrite.

Does it have to be so cold in Ireland?  
Does it have to be so cold in Ireland, for me?

Things deteriorated from there. I know his real reason for wanting to continue our meetings, but I didn't give a damn. Pride, arrogance, blah blah bah. Fucking stupid reasons. Aren't they always? It's my fault as much as his. Perhaps we'll go to Hell together. Pride is, after all, the greatest of all sins.

I rejoined Recon. I'm not sure how, but Trouble got me back in again. The Council was rather fond of the new Commander, granted, but it must have been a pain. I'm very thankful.

The reason I rejoined was simple: in Recon, I didn't have time to think. Action, reaction. A blur. A waste of life, perhaps, if the meaning of life is to feel, but it was something to do. Lucky me: I was damn good at it.

The Council likes to pretend that Artemis Fowl never existed. I like it that way. Trouble likes to pretend he never exists too. He'd rather that our relationship was a little… closer. I just wish I could pretend that he never existed as well.

There's two types of Recons I refuse to do. The first is mind wipes. The second is anything to do with Ireland.

I can't go back there.

I don't know if I'd ever come back.

Are they ready for me?

Where have you gone, from me?  
The one that I loved endlessly.

I suppose I'm considered a catch nowadays. I'm a Recon superstar again: I hold most of the records, from corediving to speed. I have a new apartment with its own conservatory. I get fanmail—fanmail!—from little girls who want to grow up to be just like me.

Life's alright, I suppose. There's nothing wrong with it. No reason to commit suicide. It's just that there's nothing particularly good about it either.

I can hold it in, most times, this odd little feeling of despair. It wriggles up like a worm after the rain, blind, pitiful, ugly, but I can't bring myself to squish it. It's there, alive, like Hope and Pride.

Despair, I can live with. Recon helps me through it. It's Love I can't cope with—it's not a little worm, it's a wind, changeable. Sometimes it's not even there at all. Other times, it's even a little cool, comforting.

But Love is also a storm wind.

I hate storms.

I prefer it when there's no wind at all.

We were to have a child.  
Yesterday's gone.  
Well I knew the time would come.  
When I'd have to leave.  
Go on.

If I went back to Arty today, things might work out. We'd talk. Make up. He might kiss me. I'd be his first. It might go further, though I can't imagine how. Perhaps we'd have the first Elf-Human child since the days of the Roman Empire.

I actually liked the idea of having kids someday. Black-haired, blue-eyed kids. I'd dream about it, about living with Arty. I'm not ashamed of it. I also used to have a huge whopper of a crush on Root, which made working quite an ordeal. I never acted on either. Haven't you ever thought of the boy next to you in math, haven't you watched him beneath your lashes, out of the corner of your eyes, haven't traced the lines of his body, wondering?

Arty will pass in time. Part of me wishes we could go back to how we were before, locked in those golden moments with toast and marmalade and a cup of hot tea. Friendship is so much simpler.

Well, it's gone now. Maybe I'll have those moments again with someone else. Trouble. Grub. Chix. Doesn't matter. I do know, however, that I _want _those little silences of contentedness, those little concertos of peace. Perhaps not with Arty. Perhaps not with the local Casanova.

D'Arvit, I _want _those.

I never wanted those before Arty came along.

Why we can't clean up the messes we leave behind, I'll never know. The psyche is strange and terrible thing.

Look what they've done to me.  
They've taken my hand...  
And it's killing me.  
Killing me, killing me, killing me!

It's not always this bad. I don't fantasize about his blue eyes while taking down rampant trolls, I don't imagine how his skin might feel while under fire. Love is never like that. It's at times like this that I can scarce bear to stand, when I lose control of my thoughts and they spiral into the what-if dimensions, when I don't even know whether I'm crying or not, when all I can feel is the slow tick of my life passing by.

I have a special pillow at home. Genuine cashmere. It's my crying pillow. I hold it and cry and cry and cry until my cheeks itch from the salt and my throat is hoarse. Then, I take a cold shower, and go to the Police Plaza to forget for a time.

I only use the pillow once or twice a year. Considering how often most females cry in comparison, I think I'm doing pretty well.

Does it have to be so cold in Ireland?  
Does it have to be so cold in Ireland, for me?  
Are they ready for me?

To be honest, I don't know if this is ever going to end. He's not going to die for another hundred years, at the rate human medicines are advancing. That's a tenth of my life, right there, wasted away, pining for a Mud Boy with pretty eyes.

Most Recons are in Ireland. Trouble wants me to work there instead, to handle the most difficult assignments of them all, to take on the media spotlights at Tara and Limerick and all those other touristy places.

He knows I don't want to go to Ireland.

Maybe he doesn't care.

Maybe he's like Arty.

Sounds like my type.

I still don't want to go to Ireland.

But I'm afraid I'm returning to Ireland.  
I'm afraid I'm returning to Ireland.  
I see, that there is nothing for me.  
There is nothing for me.

**:i:**

O.o.That was weird. Well, I hope you like it anyways... the lyrics are from "So Cold in Ireland," by an appropriately Irish band called the Cranberries. They're way cool. And theirlead singer looks like Holly.

Please review! This is my first songfic, and I want toknow whether I did it right or not.

Thanks for reading!


	2. Electric Blue

E L E C T R I C  
B L U E

- Dim Aldebaran -

**:i:**

They never did discover who had first spilled the beans, who had first sent the pictures. The government to first claim credit was, of course, the United States, the forever righteous, ever omnipotent.

Long ago, they had had an office poll on the matter:

Foaly suspected it was actually China, a rising star in both the economic and scientific world of globalization. He had always been rather fond of China before the Discovery. So adaptable, so full of potential—yet doomed to fall once the race of Mud Men collapsed with the last drop of oil. It could have been epic, if not for Mao Zedong.

Trouble had bet Switzerland, suspecting Opal had left something more than gold ingots with her favored chocolatier.

Root put his bets on India and Pakistan, simultaneously. His reasoning was that in their little cold war, considered childish by the fairies, they had found something they shouldn't have, something only desperate eyes could have found as they sought training camps and spy bases and missile silos and all the other playing pieces in the game of war.

Holly's bet was on Ireland.

_Electric blue eyes, where did you come from?_

_Electric blue eyes, who sent you?_

The black market had been the first to jump into the fray; while governments stood by, torn by bureaucracy and general disbelief, connections were made. With it came the Fowls—old habits die hard. Very hard.

It was declared an international holiday when Mud Men—or, to be politically correct, _humans_—walked the streets of Haven for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire. Calendars put it as 'Goodwill Day'; Hallmark even made cards, and it was traditional for interspecies friends to send each other cards on this day.

Artemis Fowl had been the first to spend euros there, buying _The Lower Elements Express _in its first ever English edition off of a vendor. He was a still a child, still just a little boy then, and he had seen his picture on the front cover, scowling at the camera: **FOWL OPENS NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN UN AND COUNCIL**

He was more than a business man.

He was Artemis Fowl.

He did it all.

_Electric blue eyes, always be near me;  
Electric blue eyes, I need you._

Between negotiations, he had focused his efforts on bringing legitimate companies belowground, entwining the economies of the two so helplessly that their home countries could not help but agree. He led the charge with his own Fowl Engineering Corporation, which specialized in adaptors between human and fairy technologies. It was wildly successful, of course, as everything Artemis Fowl is fated to be.

LEP, suspicious of Fowl's motives in his dynamic actions, had ordered an audit of his new company—but it was perfectly clean, perfectly clean, gleaming of new money as he spun the cultures of the two worlds closer and closer together. They could scarce believe it, Holly especially—she knew his father had been the only thing keeping him legitimate, until he died just before the Discovery had been made.

He became a regular visitor to Ops Booth—the paranoid centaur and the arrogant bastard had found each other at last. Foaly, surprisingly enough, showed no resentment as Artemis learned two thousand years of fairy technology in a matter of months. Since then, all major scientific developments had been a collaborative effort between them. There was talk of a merger between their two engineering firms.

Holly rarely talked to him—only an exchange of nods when she entered Ops to speak to Foaly, barely a smile.

She shouldn't care so much.

He was binding their worlds together.

_Domine, Domine, Deus,_

_Domine, Adiuva Me._

_Domine, Domine Deus,_

_Domine, Adiuva Me. _

Artemis Fowl was a celebrated hero amongst humans; the eighteen-year-old savior of the world. His every word was snatched at by the mobs, who worshiped them as only Gandhi's followers had before. Young, handsome, and quite possibly the most intelligent being ever to walk on or below Earth—no wonder the humans loved him, no wonder he wielded such power.

The fairies had watched in awe as he used his power to fuse the world together. Over the course of mere years he healed the ethnic conflicts using, not words, but money, pouring the money of the Fowl name into Bosnia, Rwanda, Pakistan and India. His business interests between the fairies and middle-class humans kept it coming.

_What a man_, they all said, _what a wonderful man. He saves our world now; what will he be doing in thirty years? Opening the gates to Eden?_

She knew it wasn't true.

Artemis didn't give speeches.

Artemis didn't design the latest fairy ipods.

But then where was he?

_You should know, you should know I love you,  
You should know, you should know I'm here._

There was only one wound that would not stop bleeding; and Artemis' hands were bloody with the effort.

The Middle East had not disintegrated yet, its boundaries still in that writhing, twisting state so reminiscent of torture. Globalization could not break the ties of the soul, globalization could not make one love thy neighbor, globalization could not make one forget.

Money had done its charm on everything else—Africa only needed food, and an influx of volunteers, which Artemis had gotten with his silver tongue. Bosnia needed walls and time to cool off. Pakistan and India only needed the right candidates sponsored by the multi-billion-dollar Fowl name.

The Middle East was a half-severed limb, bones broken and reset incorrectly time and time again, cutting itself in its self-pity, rotting from the corruption. Diseases could so easily spread from there to the rest of the body, a body now so perfect and beautiful.

Doctor Artemis did what he could.

If he amputated the limb, it wasn't his life that would be sacrificed—it would be the whole body, dying of blood loss from a wound nothing could cure.

No, nukes were not the answer.

Some people thought otherwise.

She knew Artemis would stay on the surface, driven by whatever had made him bind the worlds to try and heal the Middle East even as war would erupt. Who would the terrorists kill but those little 'demons' from 'Hell', who had tempted the rest of the world with their 'magic'?

He wouldn't help the fairies.

He'd abandon them for his own people in the end.

_Always be near me, guardian angel,  
Always be near me, there's no fear._

Fairies no longer had a technological edge. Within five years, their technologies had been integrated into human society with surprising ease. The humans now held the advantage:

They knew where the fairies lived, where they were concentrated, where they were weakest.

They had the numbers, the terrible, mobbing numbers.

They had the resources.

War was a messy thing nowadays. It wasn't fought with countries; it was fought with people, individuals lashing out and fading back into the mob, invisible. There was no way to fight it but with words, falling down on deaf ears like a hard rain a-falling.

D'Arvit, why did Artemis have to be a hero…? All the defenses of Haven could not fight a war when the enemy walked the streets, all the precautions could not keep homemade blue rinses from detonating…

That was how the war would be fought, merely an extension of the neoCrusades.

They could not close Haven to humans. To do so would be an act of war.

Plans were being made to escape to the stars—the Council was not as stupid as they seemed. Perhaps leaving Earth was the ultimate heresy for the fairies, but it was better than what they knew what was to come. The neoCrusades would extend to them, and they as a people were not ready for the war. But to do so was to lose their heritage, their _magic_—she'd rather die.

Perhaps she was merely being sentimental. Perhaps the prophecies of an apocalyptic war against terrorism were wrong. Perhaps Artemis would find a way to heal the greatest schism of all, that of religion, that of the soul—

But she doubted it.

Artemis was the greatest being in ten-thousand years. Was it his purpose to unite the world? Was that why he was born?—it was strange to think of all the pain he suffered, that they had suffered, to come to that point. Had her kidnapping been part of the plan? Was that blasphemous mind wipe meant to be, was Root supposed to die?

Would she be remembered as the fairy who changed his heart and saved the world? Would she be in the history books for giving him a soul—a neo-Mary, of sorts?

It seemed stranger yet to think that's how she might be remembered.

Now, he wouldn't even smile at her.

_Domine, Domine, Deus,  
Domine, Adiuva Me,  
Domine, Domine, Deus,  
Domine, Adiuva Me._

Ops Booth was five minutes from her cubicle. Ten, if you included buying some drinks along the way. It would be so easy to intrude upon them for a few minutes—it would be so pathetically easy to talk to Artemis Fowl the Great.

She could save the world with those drinks.

She could look into his eyes as he talked about how he would bring peace to the world.

He might smile at her.

Perhaps, he might save her mind instead of the world.

She doubted he would. Artemis was too much of a hero, now.

**:i:**

The song is called _Electric Blue_, by the Cranberries, an Irish rock band. The weird lyrics are in Latin, which I thought was rather appropriate for Artemis Fowl.

That was a little weird and probably a little hard to understand (it's supposed to be somewhat complex… I don't think I got that across very well…) but ah well. I hope you all liked it anyway.

Constructive criticism is always appreciated, and will be taken into account during the next revision—see my update forum. Thanks for reading!


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